On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 11:59:20AM +0300, Hakan Bayındır wrote: > > No, they do not. Most popular devices won't work at all without non- > > free firmware, including boring things such as mass storage (SD cards, > > SSD, HDD, ..., and controllers), input devices (keyboards, mice, ...). > > Yeah, you’re right. Since the firmware images always there and doesn’t > need to be hot-loaded by the driver itself 99% of the time (for these > classes of devices), I tend to forget about them. Note that this fact was mentioned many times in this thread.
> I wonder whether these “proper” firmware can be considered as part of the > hardware, FSF and/or some FSF proponents certainly think like this. Others just conveniently ignore it completely. > since it’s bundled with the hardware, but not with the driver itself. In the Linux world loadable firmware is rarely "bundled with the driver". This includes the use case discussed in this thread. > This makes matters more complicated, of course, but starting somewhere > may create the same wedging effect as in the drivers, over time. Such arguments seem to ignore that 1) it's not about "starting somewhere" because we aren't discussing something we will need to decide before some point in the future: the situation exists for many years, we are discussing whether we should change how to handle it, not how to start handling it; 2) the often mentioned expected effect on hardware manufacturers should be already felt in some form as the status quo of not providing any non-free firmware on the official image is many years old; 3) so far the usability of systems with the official image becomes worse, not better, over time. -- WBR, wRAR
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